The homepage itself has of course reverted to normal, but the gallery lives on. 

I did a little number crunching this morning and found that homepage itself received 34,604 pageviews yesterday; the average number of pageviews for the homepage on a Sunday for the current semester is 11,868, so we saw nearly triple the average traffic. So as a sheer driver of eyeballs, kittens it would seem are fairly successful. 38% of those visitors came from inside the University network, which is fairly typical.

The number of unique visitors to the website was also significantly higher this past Sunday than on an average Sunday. We had 16,500 unique visitors on April Fools, which is a 55% increase over the Sunday average this semester of 10,616. This tells me that we had both more people coming to the site and more people hitting refresh more often to see the images. We also had a much lower exit rate than normal – 32% compared to 55% – and most of that difference seems to be accounted for by people going right to the lolcat page – which accounted for 19% of the “next pages” clicked off the homepage on Sunday.

The homepage photo gallery was viewed 2,287 times yesterday, and about 8.7% of those visitors clicked through to one of the secondary pages listed in the kitty captions (About Us, Majors and Programs, Grad Studies, etc.) The “lolcats” gallery was viewed 3,444 times. 38% of that traffic came from Facebook, 25% came from the homepage, and 13% came to it directly, which I take to mean came from our weekly student e-newsletter which delivers at 8am every Sunday. (We don’t have clickthrough data for Weekly Buzz — which we’d changed to “Weekly Purr” with a kitten masthead for the day — but if I’m analyzing this right it looks like about 460 people clicked on the link to the lolcat page out of about 5,500 recipients). The lolcat page also had a significantly higher time on site number than the site average (1min 47sec compared to 1min 9seconds) but also higher exit and bounce rates than the site as a whole. Which is reasonable, I guess. People came and read all the jokey lolcats, rated their favorite ones, but then didn’t move on to anything else.

Recommendations: This year for the first time we tried to integrate the April Fools jokes with facts/messaging about the University. In hindsight, I would have done this even more, especially on the lolcats page where people did seem to spend some significant amount of time reading. Bottom line: kittens are good drivers of traffic. But when making lolcats, MAKE MORE LOLCATZ!

–lori

1.) Choose a cool cover image. The most visually striking feature of Timeline is the new cover image at the top of the page. This image is an opportunity to show visitors to the page something unique and gorgeous about you. When choosing this image I think it is especially important to think of new visitors who have not yet liked your page and do not yet potentially get your updates through their News Feeds. Karine Joly at collegewebeditor.com compiled a list of some example cover images from early adopters in higher ed.

For inspiration outside higher ed, I look no further than Cupcakes by Heather & Lori. Of course, the subject matter works in their favor. You can’t go too far wrong with cupcakes! But I love the idea of seasonality here, with their Easter cupcakes on display. Shows the potential fan what is interesting now.

This idea could definitely work in higher ed, around the academic calendar, around sports seasons, etc. Even the standard quad building beauty shot could benefit from a sense of season.

2.) Let your students provide your cool cover image. As much as I love our professional photographers, I think the cover image provides a new opportunity to showcase user-generated content.

At the University of Rochester, we’ve been running a homepage feature for about three-and-a-half years called Photo Friday. Students, faculty, staff, and alumni (even the occasional parent) submit photos and we choose the best to run as the large homepage photos every Friday. Visitors to the site vote on their favorites over the weekend, and on Monday we announce the favorite. We always post both the homepage gallery and each week’s winner to the FB page, so why not make the winner the cover image for the remainder of the week?

3.) Provide your fans with their own school-themed cover images. I love this idea from Arizona State. They provided ASU-themed cover images for their Sun Devil-crazed alumni and students, all sized up and ready to be used by their fans on their own profile pages. Such a great way to allow your fans to show off their school pride to their Facebook friends.

BTW — the cover image dimensions are 851px by 315px. You can upload a larger photo than that and Facebook will allow you to slide it around to position it as you like.

4.) Use custom cover images for your apps. Facebook tabs are a thing of the past in the new Timeline. They’ve kinda been a thing of the past for awhile though, relegated as they were to links along the left side as opposed to the true tab interface.

I never used a default landing tab other than the Wall, so I’m not very familiar with how those used to work. But in the new Timeline, tabs have a new life as apps. And each app has its own thumbnail image. There are default images (and labels) provided by Facebook, but you can change these images to align with your graphic identity or to just stand out more. This video describes how to manage and edit apps custom settings. 

Be warned: there seems to be some kind of bug in apps/tabs made with FBML. On the UofR page, for example, it keeps replacing the custom image I added to our Fast Facts page with the logo from CBS News. Also, at their developer’s conference in 2011, Facebook announced that FBML would no longer be supported starting on Jan. 1, 2012, and that FBML tabs and applications would cease to function on June 1, 2012. So something else to worry about, then.

5.) Link to your livestreamed events from your Facebook page. Cornell’s Alumni page includes a link to the Livestream.com Facebook app in its line of Facebook apps, which I think is awesome. It allows users to watch a livestreamed event while logged into Facebook — right on the school’s Facebook page — and invite their Facebook friends to join the livestream. This feels like a great way to allow for word-of-mouth communication about your live online events.

6.) Use milestones to stitch together a narrative. The new milestones feature allows you to go back in time and create Facebook posts from your school’s past. Honestly, I don’t know how much time someone who is already a fan of your page would spend clicking back through decades of milestone posts. But if you stay focused on a particular narrative and get a little creative, you can have some fun with these. For example, LSU uses milestones to track the history of their many tiger mascots, going back to “Mike I” in 1936. A fan page for a specific sports team could post a milestone with the records/stats from every season, creating a kind of almanac within Facebook and making their page a real informational resource for fans.

7.) Highlight posts to showcase great art or fans’ posts. The left-right/back-and-forth layout of the Facebook Timeline takes a little getting used to, but the Highlight feature I think makes it worthwhile. When you highlight a post, it breaks free of its left or right side of the page and spans the whole page, giving a really great photo a chance to shine.

One thing I have not gotten the hang of yet though is the fact that fans’ posts to the Wall are relegated to this “Post by Others” ghetto off to the right. I’ve already missed two questions posted there by parents of admitted students, finally replying days later. Not cool. You can highlight Posts by Others, but they are still stuck over their in their box. In the past when people would post questions to the Wall, I would sometimes re-post them so that fans would potentially see them in their News Feeds and weigh in. It will take some getting used to, but the new layout right now makes it harder for this admin to keep on top of these.

8.) Pin a post to the top of your page during important points in the academic year. Timeline allows you to “pin” a post to the top, so it doesn’t get pushed down when new items are posted. I think this concept works particularly well with higher ed’s academic calendar. Sending out your early decision letters and expecting a potential flood of new fans or visits to your page? Why not pin a “Welcome, admitted students!” post to the top of your page that week, with a link to the “Class of” group. Moving-in day coming up? Pin a post linking to a check-off list of last-minute things students should bring, accompanied by a fun video of current students showing how to pack.

Well, that’s all I got! Have you run into any other inspiring Timeline ideas, or are you working on any yourself? I’d love to hear more about them in the comments.

–lori

Four Things George Washington Could Teach Higher Ed

from Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life

1. Leaders listen. Washington’s entire management style was founded on a slow, deliberate decision-making process with input from as many experts and constituencies as possible. Unlike the British generals, who chose their staffs and fellow officers based on family standing, Washington chose self-made men like Nathaniel Greene, Henry Knox, and Alexander Hamilton as his advisers. These men were empowered to speak their minds to the Great Man, and he was open to persuasion, changing his mind when the weight of opinion was against him. In higher ed, we often stick with our own peeps — in Admissions, in Student Affairs, in Communications, in IT — because it’s certainly easier. But without listening for the big picture, as messy and uncomfortable as it can be, how can we make decisions that serve our students and faculty?

2. Leaders lead. After receiving as many opinions as possible — after taking his time and weighing all the arguments — Washington would make a decision and confidently stick to it, inspiring and focusing those around him to the task at hand. From the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse to Alexander Hamilton’s first bank bill, Washington supported his subordinates against swirling controversy and the buck stopped with him. And though he failed to take a lead in ending slavery, he did make the decision to free his slaves in his will — something that none of the other slave-owning founding fathers did. In higher education, the focus on consensus and process can make it seem as if no one is in charge, that no one is accountable. At the end of the day, someone’s gotta make a decision.

3. The non-traditional student is usually the smartest person in the room. Alone among the founding fathers, Washington had not attended college. He felt his lack of education keenly. In early writings, he adopted a highfalutin style that he thought sounded more “educated.” In gatherings, he tended to just stay quiet while orators like John Adams or Richard Henry Lee took the floor. Later in his career, Washington found the fact that people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison underestimated him useful. Washington was a life-long learner. One of the great advantages to working in higher ed is that you are surrounded by an organizational culture that values learning. Why not take advantage of that every day?

4. Leading is hard. Finally, over and over again, Washington lifted the weight of the country on his shoulders, at huge personal sacrifice: commander in chief of the Continental Army, president of the Constitutional Convention, president of the United States — twice. He didn’t want any of these positions, but he also knew that if he did not take up the challenge, the things he wanted to see happen for his country would not happen. It’s not easy, but if you aren’t going to push and push and champion your own goals or vision, who will?

–lori.

My golden nugget of fried gold from HighEdWeb 2011 was this, courtesy of rockstar niceguy and caffeine connoiseur Seth O’Dell: If you are not livestreaming your events, you do not care about your community. All it takes is one person, one laptop, and one camera.

With those words ringing like a Buddhist sutra in my ears, I’ve set about trying to bring real-time event coverage to our campus this year. My immodest goal: make livestreaming of guest speakers, panels, and performances an expectation and not an exception. When someone hears that an event is *not* going to be livestreamed, I want them to be disappointed.

So far this year, I’ve livestreamed two events and have three more coming up. Each time I’m learning something new, something I think I’ll do differently the next time around. Let’s start at the beginning:

Livestreaming Rule #1:
The Cake Is A Lie (well, at least a fib)

Seth is an inspiration and a giant amongst mortals, but his “One person, one laptop, one camera” philosophy is akin to the coach in Bull Durham saying, “You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.” He ain’t lying, but there’s a bit more to it than that.

The very first event I livestreamed did in fact involve one person (me), one laptop (and old MacBook Pro I use as a Safari test machine) and one camera (an even older Sony Handycam of the kind your dad took on vacation to Washington’s Crossing in 2002).

And it did in fact work. The event was a hastily convened ceremony for our YellowJackets a cappella ensemble who were being presented with a key to the city. It was in a huge room with bad acoustics and there was no podium mic or sound system. I just used the built-in mic on the camera to pick up the sound in the room. We ended up with 48 viewers for a webcast that was only promoted about a half an hour before it began with a homepage, Facebook, and Twitter posting.

So as a proof of concept, I’d call this one a success. With lots of research and several test runs, even a clueless neophyte like me was able to pull off a live webcast that did not crash and burn midway through. One-person-one-laptop-one-camera does work. However, both the person, the laptop, and the camera in this scenario left something to be desired. As a result, the final product did leave lots of room for improvement on both the technical quality side (especially audio), the skills side (especially me) and on the promotional side.

Things can only get better from here — stay tuned for our next exciting episode!

–lori

PS — for those interested, here are some of the specifics on the equipment used on this event.

EVENT: YellowJackets Key To the City

• Platform: Livestream; used their Livestream Studio Web-based interface
• Camera: Sony Handycam DCR-HC90 (don’t think they make ‘em anymore)
• Mic: Camera built-in
• Laptop: Macbook Pro (late 2006 model; this caused a last minute scramble to find a Firewire 800 to Firewire 400 adapter for the laptop’s older Firewire input)
• Tripod

The Iowa caucuses begin in just over an hour, and already the talking heads on CNN are creaming their pants waiting for the returns to start coming in. I’m worried.

I’m not worried about any particular result. I’m worried about the media coverage. The journalists and pundits covering this campaign haven’t had anything real to talk about for more than a year. They are like racehorses trapped in the starting gate, straining for the finish line. The language is already scary: “It finally begins!” “It’s a day that’s been circled on political calendars for months.” “It could be anyone’s game and in a few hours we’ll finally know who emerges as the winner in Iowa.” As a result of all this pent-up media energy, a completely ridiculous system involving around 200,000 corn farmers will be blown totally out of proportion.

So just what is a caucus, anyway? The mainstream media have been doing these “So just what is a caucus, anyway?” pieces all week, but they are always done with this “aw, shucks” undertone. “Aw, those cute Iowans, meeting in each others living rooms, bringing cookies and pie and talking to their neighbors about politics. That’s the stuff of democracy.” The BBC America reporters covering the caucuses seem to get particularly swept away with the heady romance of good ol’ fashioned USA democracy in action.

But the Iowa caucuses have a dirty little secret: hardly anyone participates. Part of the romance around the early electoral states of Iowa and New Hampshire is that the people in these small, unrepresentative states take their duty seriously and are really engaged in the process. In Iowa, it turns out that’s just not true. Two million of Iowa’s 3 million residents are registered to vote, and of those only 150,000 Democrats and 80,000 Republicans are expected to participate in caucuses. That’s only about 12 percent of registered voters. So much for participation.

There are other issues with the Iowa caucuses that make them less the bastion of participatory democracy that they are portrayed to be.

1. The caucuses begin at 7pm sharp. If you can’t be there at 7pm, you can’t participate. So anyone who has to work at 7pm (oh, let’s say nurses, police officers, bar and restaurant waitstaff, couples who can’t get a babysitter, the babysitters of couples who could get a babysitter, etc.) are left out in the Iowa cold.
2. When you attend a caucus, you are asked to publicly choose which candidate you prefer, usually by physically moving to a certain area of the room. If your candidate does not garner 15 percent of the participants in his or her corner, you can either leave or move to one of the other groups. It is this “neighbors persuading neighbors” bit that’s always romanticized by the pundits, but what if one of the people doing the persuading is your boss? Or your minister? Or a party activist, promising you a spot at the state’s convention delegation if you come over to their side?
3. Those initial counts — when everyone first says who they support — are not reported to anyone ever. It’s therefore possible for a candidate to come in third or fourth in the preferences of participants overall without anyone ever knowing it. For example, if you attend a caucus of 60 people a candidate must get at least nine supporters to be considered “viable.” So if six people support Dennis Kucinich, 27 people support Barack Obama, and 27 people support John Edwards, those six people in Kucinich’s corner will be asked to support another candidate. The fact that they initially supported Kucinich is never known by anyone. Multiply that across the 1,781 precincts in Iowa, and you’ll never know how many people in Iowa actually thought Dennis Kucinich would make a good Democratic presidential nominee.
4. Forgetting all that nonsense for a moment, even after the Kucinich supporters in our example above move on to support, say, Obama, those vote totals are not reported either! So if there are 60 people in that room, the result coming out of that precinct is not “Obama: 33, Edwards: 27.” Those totals are plugged into a mathematical formula that no one ever explains! except to say “it’s reaaaallly complicated, Wolf!” That formula decides how many state delegates each of the two candidates in our scenario will receive (not national convention delegates; those are different). Our hypothetical precinct might have only three or four delegates, and that’s the only number that counts in the end of this “democratic” process.

My rule of thumb: if a system requires this much explanation, it’s probably not that good.

–lori

UPDATE: My mistake above. My post from 2008 was referencing the Democratic caucus rules. The GOP caucuses work differently. They do have a secret ballot, and there is only one vote with those raw vote tallies counted and reported. I was right about the participation rates though; they are abysmal.

1.) Make live-campus event coverage a reality. And then make it an expectation. The first thing I did when I got back to Rochester was talk to my boss about Seth O’Dell’s red stapler-winning presentation on live-event coverage. And to my boss’s credit, he gets it, and agrees that we should be doing this. But the problem is one that Seth articulated: there is no one who’s job this is right now. Well now it’s my job. Or at least it’s my job to figure out whose job it is. Because as Seth said, “If you are not livestreaming your events, you don’t care about your community.” It is that important.

(Of course, the next logical question is, if you are streaming your guest speakers, why not livestream your classes? And that’s where the conversation gets really interesting.)

2.) Introduce some real project management up in here! Right now, my main project management tool is my inbox, and most of my deadlines are “as soon as possible” or “when you get a chance.” This is not good. Alana Riley’s session on leading successful projects was packed full of so many tools and resources. She almost made project management seem easy. Almost. Easy enough for me to give it a try, anyway.

3.) Stay positive and get out of my own way. This is a tough one. As I stare at the aforementioned inbox, I have 434 unread email messages from my week away in Austin. The post-heweb glow usually lasts about a week or so before I feel myself slowing sinking back under that weight. But as Dan Frommelt said in his presentation on project management by Attila the Hun, “You can laugh or you can cry. And one of these is dignified.” I usually am a pretty positive person around the office, I think. But I do allow myself to get  overwhelmed by events. This year, in an attempt to save my sanity, I resolve to say “no” more often (see Fran Zablocki’s post “It’s All Your Perfect Little Fault” because I can’t put it any better than this) and finally, to quote from Karlyn Morisette’s red-stapler winning session, I resolve to get out of my own way, and to not let the myriad little things distract me from the big, important things.

See you in Milwuakee — stay HighEdWeb, my friends (shout out to Mark Greenfield!)

–lori

What if what our community wants is a place where they can participate in social media? What if they want to update their Facebook status and friend their childhood sweethearts and play Farmville just like everyone else? If the library creates this space for them, is this knowledge creation? Or has the library just become a free computer lab? Or is the latter the beginning of the former?

It can be if you insert the one thing that makes a library a library, and that’s a librarian. If that librarian creates guides about the different social networking sites out there; or teaches workshops on how to present and protect your social identity, or how to use social networking to look for a job; or hosts a social networking “petting zoo,” to demonstrate the latest social tool on the block, then he or she is facilitating knowledge creation in their community.

–lori

When I worked as an editor at MSN Search in the mid-1990s, the main goal of our staff was to organize the content of the World Wide Web around the language used in the most commonly entered search terms on our site. The leaders and many members of this team were librarians, and we used library-like language to describe our work. We created synsets with disambiguators to group and describe these keywords, then assigned Web sites or individual Web pages to those synsets in the ranked order we wanted them to be returned to the user of the search engine.

For example, we may see a new term in our keyword logs one week: Saturn. First we’d need to determine whether that keyword was a part of a larger keyphrase that was already in the database. So maybe we already had a synset for “Sega Saturn,” a sadly defunct video game console system. If so, maybe we could add “Saturn” as a new keyword to that synset and call it a day? But does Saturn mean anything else? Of course. There’s Saturn (planet), Saturn (car manufacturer), and Saturn (Roman god). That’s three new synsets to create. Now we need to search the keyword logs for other search queries that equal each of these concepts. Does a search for “Saturn’s rings” get its own sysnet, or can that query be added to Saturn (planet)? And where do queries like “Saturn facts” or “Saturn information” go? Once the synset work is done, now we have to find websites that the editorial staff think best answer each of these queries. We would even write the descriptions for these sites so that when a visitor to MSN Search enters the search term “Saturn,” they receive a lovingly hand-crafted set of the best search results back in return.

In hindsight this approach has many flaws (Microsoft didn’t lose the search wars for nuthin’!). A team of 20 human editors can only tackle so much. We did not open the process up to other professionals — other librarians — to expand the number of credible contributors. We also tended to focus on new search terms and the most popular terms, so that once a search term was included in a synset it would not usually be revisited. And — crucially, I think — Microsoft did not promote the fact that there were reliable, credible human beings doing this work. In fact, they hid it. PR materials would describe MSN Search as being powered by “SmartSense.” What was SmartSense, you ask? We were SmartSense! The 20 librarians, indexers, and editors in the editorial suite out in Redmond! We even had t-shirts made: “Ask me: I have SmartSense.”

As a technology company, Microsoft was proudest of its technology solutions: its crawler, its results engine, its throughput. And of course, the real goals of the service were more about selling banner advertising and sponsored links, and driving users to other MSN resources. But having started down the path of creating a credible, human-powered system for finding the connections between the information people were looking for on the Web, Microsoft did not have the SmartSense to see it.

–lori

This is the organizing principle of David Lankes’ book, The Atlas for New Librarianship. I suspect it is also the organizing principle of his life, brain, and sock drawer. The man lives librarianship with a passion that is infectious and inspiring. And it makes me embarrassed at my 25-year-old self who had an opportunity to enter the library field but thought, “I don’t really want to be a librarian.” That girl was an idiot.

To be fair to my inner idiot, I was working from a very stereotypical view of librarians that was not uncommon. I imagined that as a librarian I would spend all day doing data entry, filing, and shelving. And while I did love to read, I did not especially relish a future surrounded by books and journals.

Not that there is anything wrong with books and journals. But there is nothing sacred about them either. For a long time now, the best tools for sharing and accessing information and then turning that information into new knowledge were text artifacts like books. They still are great tools. But they are only the tools. And the mission of librarians is not simply to organize the tools.

–lori

P.S. — TRUE FACT: I worked at Microsoft during the time period Lankes describes in his opening chapter when discussing how the difference in worldview led Wikipedia to succeed over Encarta. In fact, my Scottish husband was, rather hilariously, hired as an editorial assistant at Encarta to write captions for photos of German castles. He used to go to the library and look them up in Encyclopedia Britannica.